The actual architecture of the FORTH, Scheme and (older generation) TCL interpreters are archaic. You’ve got a lexical analyzer, but not a parser, and generally not a bytecode interpreter in the traditional sense. More recent TCL versions have moved in the bytecode direction to improve performance, but classic TCL was essentially LISP with lists implemented as space-separated strings.
Javascript is basically an ALGOL-type language with a conventional implementation, but it certainly radical in quite a few ways.
Personally I miss ECMAScript 4; I would have liked to have seen a Javascript-like language with stronger typing, better IDE support and more support for programming in the large. It would be appealing to have a programming environment where we could share code on the client and the server, even if it would be a terrible temptation for people to make mistakes
]]>Javascript is an exotic dynamic language–but this fact has been carefully concealed. Which is a shame.
]]>